The UK’s five largest banks may have to find billions of pounds of extra high-quality capital to back their pension schemes under regulations coming in next year.

Pensions consultancy Redington has calculated the requirement as £12 billion. It cautions that it has used figures from the banks’ 2012 accounts. Banks could have reduced their liability by reducing equity exposure since then.

Redington based its analysis on an announcement in December by the Prudential Regulation Authority, the Bank of England’s risk watchdog, on how it would apply new EU capital requirements to banks’ pension finances.

The PRA said that under part of the EU Capital Requirements Directive IV, which comes into force on January 1 next year, the quality of capital banks hold against their pension schemes would have to be higher. Around half of their pension risk will have to be backed by core Tier 1 capital, the highest quality, consisting of shareholders’ equity and retained earnings.

The provisions are “far more punitive than the pension trustees’ usual deficit measures”, according to Antony Barker, director of pensions at Santander, one of the banks analysed by Redington.

He said that such standards were not applied to “a motor manufacturer or an airline”, adding that the move “completely transformed” the management of banks’ pension liabilities.

An equity analyst who covers the UK banks said: “Pensions risk is being incorporated into capital requirements in a way that’s raising those requirements for every UK bank that we cover that has a substantial pension scheme.”

Any transfer of capital to back the pension scheme would be unwelcome when banks are being urged by regulators to strengthen their balance sheets.

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The PRA has not decided the detailed formula for the new requirements, so there is considerable uncertainty about the numbers. A spokeswoman for the authority said it would begin consulting on implementation “later this year”.

The Redington estimates are based only on the equity portfolios of the banks’ pension funds, as information on these is disclosed in a consistent way. Further details of their investment portfolios and capital requirement calculations are not made public.

It estimated that Lloyds, with the largest pension liability of the five and the highest level of equity investment in its pension portfolios, would need the most extra Tier 1 capital, £2.7 billion based on the 2012 data.

Its other estimates were £2.4 billion at RBS, £1.4 billion at Barclays, £500 million at HSBC and £440 million at Santander UK.

The PRA spokeswoman said that while Redington’s calculations on equity risk were correct, because they did not consider other assets, they did not convey the full capital requirement for a bank’s defined benefit scheme.

Apart from Santander, the banks declined to comment or were not available.